


Fault-lines

by La Reine Noire (lareinenoire)



Category: Othello - Shakespeare
Genre: Canon Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, F/M, Yuletide, offensive language
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-24
Updated: 2009-12-24
Packaged: 2017-10-05 04:04:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,214
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/37615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/pseuds/La%20Reine%20Noire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It was not Iago's fault that he saw better than other men.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fault-lines

**Author's Note:**

  * For [athousandwinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/athousandwinds/gifts).



> Thank you so much to Gileonnen for the last-minute beta!

It was not Iago's fault that he saw better than other men.

 

Where most saw a Moor of unconquerable skill, a man not trapped by his beginnings but awakened by them, scaling the heights of Venetian acclaim, Iago saw a trapped stag, antlers wrenching and hooves smashing against his captors.

 

That the Moor was trapped, Iago knew better than anyone.

 

What he had not realised was the extent of that trap, the depth and sheer insidious tangle of faculties that left him wondering at the Moor's ability to command anyone at all, so utterly incapable was he of controlling himself.

 

But perhaps it was simply that, in his own way, the Moor was as accomplished an actor as Iago himself. He might even have convinced himself that he was free, that his love for fair Desdemona exalted him, completed his transformation into Othello the _Venetian_. He did not see, as Iago did, the way men's eyes skittered from him, the smirks, the twists of their mouths in disgust.

 

Othello had not stood beneath Brabantio's window and crowed maliciously at the thought of a blackamoor ravishing an angelic lady of previously unspoilt virtue, of Desdemona's rapture as she opened her legs to a rutting beast. It had been hard, too hard, not to laugh at all of it. Not to howl at every predictable shriek Brabantio made, crying after his sluttish daughter.

 

No, it was not Iago's fault that he wanted nothing more than to laugh at them all, to glory in their ignominy, and to know that he alone had pulled them from on high to the depths of Dante's Hell.

 

And it was so easy. So painfully easy.

 

First, Cassio, drunk on his own self-love as much as the wine Iago fed him, stumbling about like a buffoon. Roderigo barely even merited his interest, scarce more than a walking purse spouting dire sonnets and half-witted soliloquies on the merits of Desdemona's eyes. Was it any wonder, Iago was disposed to muse, that Venice had fallen into such a state, that the Turk hovered on the city's very doorstep if these were its men of valour? A Moor, practically an animal, a too-susceptible Florentine, and Roderigo.

 

But even Florentines had their uses. Dante claimed it as his home, as did Petrarch, that useless balladeer, and it was the latter whose charms Cassio had seen fit to hone in himself, the right music to make any wench dance withal.

 

That Desdemona had no interest in him, even a blind man could have seen. It was a game she played, as all other ladies did, even his own wife, though she was too shrewish to see it through, and saw no reason to waste such trifles on her husband. But the Moor was different. The Moor worshipped his wife as if she were the Blessed Virgin herself, carved of marble and gazing down upon him from an altar. Every action had a thousand significations, a thousand meanings, any one of which could be twisted just far enough.

 

One crack, and the entire edifice would collapse.

 

***

 

"Handkerchief?" Emilia narrowed her eyes. "What do you want with her handkerchief?"

 

"To cast a love-spell?" he teased, stealing a kiss. "Or perhaps luck would be more fitting, as there seems no lack of love, so much as lack of opportunity."

 

"Fie on you!" She laughed. "I'll wager they've found the chance by now. Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and drunken Cassio or not, I'll say my lady is well and truly bedded."

 

"Will you wager me the handkerchief? I tell you she is not."

 

"Still harping on handkerchiefs! Lord have mercy upon us. How men do carry on." Emilia took his chin firmly in her hand. "Very well, husband. A wager it shall be. An my lady be still a maid, I shall conjure it for you."

 

***

 

Cassio's dream had been a masterstroke.

 

It had come to him as he crept into the Florentine's chamber and noted the battered book lying beside his bed. A cursory examination revealed it to be Dante, _La Vita Nuova_, a dream of dead Beatrice.

 

Iago dreamt as other men did. One night, some weeks before the Moor's clandestine marriage, he had seen him deep in conversation with Emilia, and had dreamt of his wife's breathless cries beneath a black weight. There was no logic in the dream; Emilia could barely spare time from her duties to bed her husband, let alone the Moor, but the image had lingered, festering. He had not told her that, blaming baleful rumour for his folly.

 

But dreams could make any man pause, and it was a dream Iago wove for his commander, a dream of tangled white limbs and whispers, of a seamy bed, of a whore's lusts beneath his angelic Desdemona's face. And they haunted the dreamer after, pursued him relentlessly until even the strongest man could not forbear to face them or to flee altogether.

 

Where he had once ignored gibes and sneers, now the Moor imagined them everywhere. _Work on, my medicine, work on; thus credulous fools are caught_. But the Moor had not been credulous at first, not until Iago had inspired him to dream of cuckoldry--

 

_How shall I murder him, Iago?_

 

\--and it was his misfortune that he made his choice.

 

***

 

_If some eternal villain, some buzy and insinuating rogue, some cogging, cozening slave, to get some office, have not devis'd this slander, I'll be hang'd else._

 

She had always been clever, his wife; indeed, it was why he had married her. But that was long ago, when his prospects had shone bright as orient gold. Before Cassio.

 

That Emilia's quick wits had not gone so far, he was forced to credit Desdemona's distress. And it was a pretty picture indeed, the young wife wringing her white hands, her face perplexed as a virgin saint's.

 

The trap was closing fast, Roderigo moved to despatch Cassio, and Iago himself biding his time to finish the bumbling Venetian. The thought of Emilia haunted him now, the niggling, treacherous suspicion that his too-clever wife would overturn his delicate plans.

 

It had not been Iago's intention to kill anybody--at least not with his own hand. That was too messy, too unpredictable. He had a soldier's awareness of how difficult it was to properly kill a man, and watched, wincing, as Roderigo stumbled in the dark, at Cassio's mercy.

 

There was some gratification to be found in stabbing the fool, watching the blood bubble from his lips as it drowned his revealing words. But it was not his plan and for that he cursed it.

 

_This is the night that either makes me, or fordoes me quite_.

 

***

 

The bedchamber had become a charnel-house, smelling of blood and death. On the bed, tangled together, two women now lay, one strangled and the other stabbed.

 

_I know thou didst not, thou art not such a villain_.

 

Oh, but he was such a villain. It had not been Emilia's tongue, but her eyes, that dawning recognition, that horror, that Iago had sought to forestall.

 

"Are you the cause of all this?" Lodovico demanded.

 

Iago looked him in the eye, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth.

 

"Aye. I am the cause, by my soul."

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Little Ship of Dreams (Trapped Bird Remix)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7415515) by [SegaBarrett](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SegaBarrett/pseuds/SegaBarrett)




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